Culture Shock in America

My third year at Tohoku University in Sendai was devoted to writing up a lengthy dissertation on Shugendo. Knowing that the academic graveyard is full of grad students who never took their doctoral exams, or failed them, or did not complete a dissertation, I felt relieved. However, this sense of satisfaction was offset by two practical matters—finding a way back to the U.S., and obtaining a teaching job. Still a naïve graduate student, I had always figured that I could work my way through financial jams. But by the summer of 1965, we would be a family of two adults and three children, and we had not been able to save our return fare to America out of the barely adequate $300 monthly stipend from Fulbright. Mrs. Hori, while talking with my wife, got wind of our situation. She spoke to her husband, who arranged for me to teach a weekly conversational English session at a Toyota plant that made piston rings for engines. The generous pay enabled us to set aside enough to purchase the cheapest trans-Pacific crossing, on a Japanese immigration ship.

Totally preoccupied with completing the Ph.D., I didn’t know about the complexities of securing a college or university position, not realizing that interviews are required for new hires. Professor Kitagawa at the Divinity School found a way around this bottleneck. He negotiated for me to be a one-year sabbatical replacement for a professor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville; sabbatical replacements did not require interviews. During that year at Vanderbilt, I could look for a permanent position. We loaded what we could in a large trunk and sent it to the port at Kobe. As part of our ship passage to Los Angeles and a train ticket to Nashville, we received free baggage allowance from Japan to an international destination, including rail transit, all the way to Nashville.

We took the train from Sendai to Tokyo, friends seeing us off on the train, and other friends bidding us farewell at Kobe. The Santos Maru, an immigration ship, had been built to transport Japanese who went to South America for work, or were permanently relocating there. The ship made a non-stop trip from Kobe to Los Angeles, and then proceeded to several destinations in South America. By the 1960s, migration from Japan to the southern hemisphere had slowed down so much that the shipping company decided to convert the Santos Maru to a freighter. We booked the ship’s last passenger voyage.

A small number of passengers, like us, had first class status, with an above deck cabin; many people below deck were second class. Our accommodations were adequate, but a world away from what cruise ship travelers know today. We ate in a good dining room, which even provided a birthday cake for each of our two sons with birthdays in July. Diapers and laundry presented a problem on this seventeen-day trip. The ship had no exercise or entertainment amenities, making for a rather boring journey.

At the first sight of landfall, everyone lined the decks. Arriving in Los Angeles, I thought Japan and three years of things Japanese lay behind me. But as I looked around the harbor, I saw a ship with the name “Hagurosan” (Mount Haguro). An old custom in Japan is to name ships after mountains. So Haguro had made the trip with me, and in fact memories of that sacred peak would never leave me.

Viewing the dock, I experienced my first instances of reverse culture shock. Very sporty cars that I had never seen drove around the port. Others told me these cars were Mustangs, very popular in the 1960s. Also, for the first time I saw kids riding bicycles with a sloping narrow seat that extended over the rear wheel—what I learned was called a “banana seat.”

At Los Angeles we boarded a Santa Fe train headed for Chicago. We enjoyed our compact compartment; our two older boys loved to roam the train and eat in the dining car. After family reunions in Illinois, Virginia’s father accompanied us to Nashville in his car, pulling a U-haul trailer. We repeated the pattern of Sendai, where we had rented the house of a Japanese professor on sabbatical. In Nashville, we subleased the furnished apartment of the Vanderbilt professor I was replacing for his sabbatical. He even let me use his bicycle for the three-mile trip to the university. For most of that year we lived without a car. I used a grocery cart to walk to and from the grocery store, and also to make the round trip to the laundromat.

First years are difficult. I had not been prepared for my initial year of graduate school, nor was I ready for beginning dissertation research in Japan. And I found myself not really primed to begin teaching undergraduates at Nashville, facing a kind of educational culture shock. For years I had been looking through a mental microscope at many aspects of Shugendo. Teaching a required course for college students, I needed a wide-angle lens to deal with Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, and other religions. The humorous advice given to me by the man I was replacing, was to consider the course “Non-Christian Living Religions of the World” as NCLRW, the Nashville, Chattanooga, and Louisville RailWay. Somehow the students and I made our way through that spiritual journey.

Teaching at an American university put me on familiar academic turf. By contrast, living in Nashville resulted in some reverse culture shock for Virginia and me. We had never lived or traveled in the South, so we were taken aback by racist attitudes and language. Virginia struck up a conversation with the neighbor lady across the hall from us, who questioned her about what it was like living among Japanese. Virginia said we had a good time in Japan, and made friends there. The conversation shifted to American race relations, and the neighbor said that “we” can get along with “them,” and “they” can get along with “us,” as long as “they” stay in their place. Virginia and I, after living for three years in Japan as the outsider minority, were surprised by this kind of innuendo.

In Japan I had to become used to the local zuzuben dialect. In Nashville, sometimes I had difficulty understanding Southern speech. When I asked a man for directions to a store, he said in a pronounced drawl, “It’s right next to the piyutt shop,” pronouncing piyutt almost like pivot. I asked him several times to repeat himself, and he got so exasperated, he slapped his thigh and said loudly, “the PI-YUTT shop.” When I located the store I was looking for, I saw that it was next to a pet shop!

While at Vanderbilt, I was able to secure a position as assistant professor at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Michigan. We had managed to save enough of my salary to buy a ten year- old Ford station wagon. Loading the kids in the back seat, we stacked our belongings behind them, and filled a small U-haul trailer. Leaving Nashville proved to be more exciting than planned, because north of Nashville is a steep hill leading into the mountains. Our fully packed car and heavy trailer made me worry whether our vehicle could make the trip. As we climbed that first long hill, the engine labored and we slowed down, turning off the air conditioner. I watched the needle of the heat gauge climb from normal to hot and move into the red “danger” zone. Saying nothing to my family, I hoped the radiator would not boil over or the engine blow up.

Relieved when we reached the top of the hill, I let the car coast on the downhill slope, pleased to see the engine temperature fall back to normal. But soon we picked up speed and faced a more dangerous situation. The overloaded trailer tended to push the car down the hill, and our car’s aging shock absorbers made the car bounce up and down, and start to swerve back and forth. I couldn’t hit the brakes too hard, which would cause the trailer and car to jackknife. In my mind I was reading the next day’s local newspaper headline: ENTIRE FAMILY KILLED IN MOUNTAIN CAR ACCIDENT.
Eventually the car slowed down and I regained control of the car. I think the children enjoyed that roller coast ride over the mountains, which for me was a daytime nightmare. The miracle was that our old car took us all the way from Nashville to Kalamazoo.

The Ford wagon delivered our family and belongings to Michigan, but did not prepare us for the economic shock of being new home owners. The bank required me to hand over my only asset, a small life insurance policy, as collateral for a down payment. We bought a small Cape Cod house, and managed to meet the mortgage payments. The university paid us every two weeks on Tuesday. We learned we could go to the grocery store late Saturday night and write a check, because banks were closed on Sunday, and the store could not deposit our check until Monday, and it would not be processed until Tuesday.

We managed regular expenses, but not doctor’s bills. My first year of teaching at Western Michigan University, I had to rely on my grad school initiative—I got a job working four early morning hours in the kitchen at a state mental institution, before heading off to classes. I quit that job just before Christmas, because I was able to get a better paying seasonal job at the post office. After that first term of teaching, I signed up for off campus courses for extra money.

Culture shock can hit you in any country, and can surprise you with differences in customs and attitudes, as well as language. Financial problems also can count as a kind of culture shock. Life as a grad student helped me and my wife overcome these obstacles as we entered university life.